When There Was No Future
For Ronnie Cramer
Jonathan Berzer
It’s near midnight when Thea parks her lumbering 1977 LTD in the slush of a quiet Capitol Hill side street. She clamps on the steering wheel lock. She bolts the accelerator lock. She stashes her cassette player in the glovebox. Then she steps out into the frigid Denver night to get undressed. By the light of a streetlamp, she pulls off her outerwear: her parka, her sweater, her thermal top, her gloves and scarf. She doesn’t stop until she’s left in only a Joy Division T-shirt, pants, and boots. The winter gear gets buried under the seat beneath a pile of newspapers. She never brings a purse, only cash, her ID, and cotton for her ears. Cursing and shivering, she locks the car and sets off for the club, running in the street to keep from slipping on the ice.
Outside Meat Locker, a squad of skinheads loiter and slurp from bagged cans of beer. Their boots and army surplus are supposed to make them look like soldiers, but their faces are soft and babyish. With their sheared heads, they look like newborns.
Kidd the bouncer, a University of Colorado offensive tackle, literally blocks the door. Thea pays her ten bucks and holds up her ID. Kidd scans the card with a flashlight.
“Thea Thud? That’s your name?” he asks with wry amusement.
“Uh huh,” Thea answers briskly. She’s a good sixteen inches below Kidd’s eye level and has to crane her neck to look up at him.
“Is that your real name or did you make it up?”
“That’s my real name,” she says with the defiance that comes from having had this conversation about a million times, and at four-foot-eleven, having spent half her life looking up to people she considers inferior. “I was born for punk,” she adds with a snarl.
Kidd nods with a laugh. “In you go. Watch your step. Don’t go thud.”
Thea rolls her eyes and squeezes past him.
To step into Meat Locker is to experience a carnival of sensory extremes. The temperature is somewhere in the 90s, which instantly cures Thea of her hypothermia, but that’s the club’s only aesthetic benefit. Otherwise, it’s a shithole. It’s a filth-lined cesspool that would have to be power-washed for a year just to be the Augean stables before Hercules ran a river through it. It’s a former dry cleaners with no windows, crappy lights, and a stage. There’s nowhere to sit, barely room to stand, and stale air that’s comprised of secondhand smoke and sweat. The word EXIT might as well be replaced with the word BURN. There’s a guy in the corner selling Coors from a keg. There’s one toilet, though Thea’s never dared venture near it and wouldn’t unless she were looking for a place to die.
Having been grabbed and groped too many times, Thea steers clear of the mosh pit and the melee of idiots who’ve come to Meat Locker just to fight and spit. She finds what would be a quiet corner if this were a teahouse and settles in for the long wait that is the price of clubgoing.
The mixing board operator puts on the house music while the stage is cleared by roadies. Thea feels the bile rise in her throat. She makes her way over to the man’s riser against the back wall.
“Hey,” she says.
The man, a long-hair in a Zeppelin T-shirt, looks around as if he’s received a call from God.
“Can you not play Pink Floyd?”
The guy looks at her through vague, bloodshot eyes.
“Can you play something good?”
“This is good,” he answers.
“It’s 1981, can’t you play something new? We’re trying to do something. We’re tearing down the wall.”
“This is The Wall,” says the engineer, clearly thinking Thea has come to make a request.
She’s almost tempted to run back to her car and get one of her mix tapes. “Can’t you play anything new?”
The man holds out a box of cassettes with nothing but AOR.
“Billy Joel? Yeah, play that,” she says with a grin.
The man lowers his voice. “Are you kidding? These guys would set the place on fire.”
“Maybe they should.” She turns on her heels and returns to her spot.
At 1AM, the band she’s come to see takes the stage. The Bunnydrums play in near darkness. The music is darker than the room, hypnotic and grim, what would emerge if a jack hammer had pangs of loneliness. Thea finds a place on the side where she’s not hemmed in by all the taller, smellier bodies.
The band is halfway through their set when something smacks into Thea’s head and breaks at her feet. She falls to her knees as a fist of pain radiates from her occipital bone. All around her is broken glass that resembles a beer bottle. Nobody helps her up. Nobody seems to notice she’s on the floor. Everybody in places like this has seen just about everything.
She stands and kicks the glass away. She’s more angry than injured. Now there’s a throbbing bruise on her head competing with the music. She’s not going to let some asshole ruin her night, but after ten minutes, the rising headache has soured her on the whole experience. She shoves her way to the exit, treating each person in her path like the one who was responsible.
The night air proves to be a balm to her spirit and her head, while the heat emanating off her bare arms forms a barrier against the chill. She sits on the curb and takes up a handful of ice from the sidewalk and holds it to her scalp.
A guy who’s dressed like the enemy comes up to her. “Are you okay?” he asks. He looks at her through punch-me-in-the-face wire-rimmed glasses. His parka is a bit too new. His buttoned-down shirt is standard officewear. His shoes are the soft suede of a church-going dad. His hair is floppy and formless. He looks around forty.
“Yeah.” Thea answers, taking turns with each hand to hold the ice. “Happens all the time,” she tries to say with nonchalance. “Are you the owner or something?”
“No. I’m here for the bands. I’m Henry from KJRJ.”
She gives his attire a critical appraisal. “Maybe the bottle was meant for you.”
“I heard what you said to Mr. Pink Floyd. You should come by the station.”
She frowns.
“I’m the program director.”
“What’re you doing here?”
“Well, why wouldn’t I be here. It’s my job.”
“KJRJ. Music for the Elderly,” she says in a radio announcer’s silky dulcet tone.
“I know, I know. I’m trying to introduce new music. Trying.” He looks around with a resigned sigh.
“Really? You guys? You might want to think about what you wear next time.”
Henry shakes his head. “It’s not about clothes or hair. It’s about the music. That’s why I’m here. U2 is coming to Denver. There’s no reason why a commercial station can’t lead the charge. Rock and roll used to be about innovation, about the cutting edge. Now record companies and big radio don’t give a shit. They’ve decided what’s rock and roll, and it stopped dead in 1976.”
Thea pats her head for blood. “You know, they don’t sell beer in bottles inside. Somebody snuck one in and launched it. No wonder nobody takes us seriously.”
Henry offers to take a look at her scalp and says he sees nothing serious between the spikes of hair. “Come by the station.”
“Why?”
“I want to put you on the air.”
Thea isn’t sure whether he’s trying to sleep with her, is putting her on, or is simply deranged. “What?” is all she can reply.
“I want you to have your own show.”
“I don’t know anything about radio.”
“That’s why I want you on the air.”
When she frowns at him, he frowns back.
“I’m serious,” he says. “Deadly serious. Like a bottle to the head.”
~ ~ ~
Growing up in Denver, Thea, despite having the surname of something dull and lifeless, was anything but. She not only fit in, she was the poster child for fitting in. She wore Ralph Lauren and got her hair cut in a style that could be considered East Coast Colorado outdoorsy. She skied, kayaked, played field hockey. She spent Christmases sitting by a fireplace in a cabin that looked like a gingerbread house, singing along to holiday standards.
Thea didn’t understand people who fought with their parents. She loved her parents. Her dad the classical guitarist, her mom the optometrist were the epitome of square, and why not. That’s what parents were supposed to be. They were early to bed, early to rise, thrifty and sensible. Theodore Thud’s great act of rebellion was becoming an expert skier, gracefully carving up black diamond runs all over the world, never once going thud. Dr. Janice Shipley—who did not take her husband’s name for professional reasons—birthed three boys before Thea came along and was so relieved to have a daughter that she practically smothered her in pink and velvet. Thea’s brothers were typical pot-smoking jocks with ‘70s hair and a disdain for anything formal, especially their father’s music. Growing up surrounded by giant trees, mountain peaks, and a soundtrack provided by her father’s nimbly-strumming fingers, Thea developed a very economical sense of self. The key to happiness was to avoid things that made one unhappy. She liked music that had an easy beat and could be danced to and aspired to be Olivia Newton John or a neurologist.
Then in the summer of her freshman year, she jetted off to London to continue her studies in art history, tour Parliament, The National Gallery, The Tate, and take side trips to Paris and Florence, where The Louvre, The Pompidou, and David waited. One afternoon while sipping tea outside the Gloucester Arms, she was thumbing through a stray copy of The Face and happened upon an interview with Siouxsie Sioux, where the queen of goth dismissed Bruce Springsteen’s music as hideous. Thea gasped. Anyone with Siouxsie’s racoon eye makeup should be careful about who she calls hideous. This was heresy. No one back home would ever dare trash The Boss. She pushed the magazine aside, finished her tea and walked the few short blocks to Proms at Royal Albert Hall.
Her conversion didn’t happen overnight. It began with The Police, Graham Parker, and Elvis Costello. She thought The Pistols were gross, but their sound was so infectious that she’d start pogoing in the pub until people told her to stop. Then came Digital. She fell in love with Ian Curtis, then Ian McCulloch. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw a middle-school class treasurer. Her hair expressed nothing about her except that she was a nobody, so she chopped it short and dyed it blue black.
When she got back to Denver, she marched into her apartment, yanked Neil Young off the turntable and put on Gang of Four. Her roommates withdrew as if some feral dog had broken into their home. They looked at her spiked hair and combat boots and suggested she attend a Bible study. A week later, Thea would find a new place to live.
She was the first punk in the history of the University of Denver. She reveled in the stares of the Republican preppies who dominated the campus. Ironically, instead of becoming an outcast, her transformation made her a draw. She was approached by those who wanted to know why she’d painted NO FUTURE with Liquid Paper on the back of her beat-to-hell leather jacket. It also made her irresistible to guys, who, not knowing their asses from a hole in the ground, assumed that because she dressed like a punk, it meant she was not beholden to the conventions of dating and courtship, and thus was an easy lay. As a result, she’d devised many new and creative ways of saying, Fuck off.
The music changed her, and it was through the music that she was able to see past the veneer, that everybody was troubled in one way or another, that her father hid behind his guitar to avoid uncomfortable silence or uncomfortable discussions with her mother, that her brothers were terrified of navigating a world that was not as orderly and unambiguous as a hockey rink or a slalom course. This new music wasn’t about partying and feeling good but about feeling the pain that everybody seeks to bury and letting it out with a ferocious, Hey Ho Let’s Go! Thea had found the truth and there was no going back.
~ ~ ~
The next night, Thea’s at DU’s one and only pub, waiting for The Penetraitors to take the stage. She greets Ronnie, the band’s guitarist and songwriter, and takes a table near the front. The pub is small, the stage sliced out of one corner. The bar serves a light beer that’s suitable for those too young to drink. The other students, who huddle around pitchers with their backs to the stage, look like Thea before she went to London. They’re clearly not here for the band.
While the band sets up, Thea is drawn into a quarrel with her archeology professor, a bearded ponytail from the ‘60s, who proclaims that the music of her generation is crap.
Eyes narrowing, Thea pounces. “Your generation created the shit we’re in,” she says as they face off, each gripping a pint of lager. “Our music gets people on their feet, speaks to them about their lives. Our music is a wake-up call.”
The archaeologist’s haughty laugh drips with condescension. “Our music is timeless. Nobody’s going to be listening to punk rock new wave whatever in twenty years. Our music is the greatest music that ever was. It helped end a war and spoke to civil rights. You can’t deny our history.”
Thea huffs and shakes her head. “You rebelled against the establishment. Now we’re rebelling against you, and you can’t stand it. You’re the establishment now, and it’s driving you crazy.”
“Yeah? What about Devo?” the man says, as if laying down four aces.
“Hey, I’ll take Mongoloid over Eric Clapton any day.”
“Clapton is God,” the professor declares with evangelical conviction. After a sip of beer, he puts his glass aside. “So, you wanna go back to my place and fool around?”
Thea scowls. “It’s bad enough that you’re a teacher and I’m a student, but the fact that you like Clapton makes me wanna puke.”
And so ends their debate. This isn’t quite a bottle to the head, but the man’s self-righteous posturing has burrowed into her brain, and even though The Penetraitors open with one of her favorites, the music is once again tainted.
When the pub closes, Thea commits to a long walk on a path of snow. She heads off in no particular direction, hands jammed in the pockets of her parka. She’s been taking a lot of these walks lately, stomping through snow, going nowhere, grumbling under her breath about the state of the world, or her life and the people in it. Her parents are convinced that London ruined their daughter. Her mother’s only response to Thea’s artful explanation of the new music revolution was, What have you done to your hair? When her brothers gang up on her in defense of Foreigner and Bad Company, she retaliates by throwing their Penthouse magazines into the fireplace. Her childhood friends Lisa, Laura, and Leslie are replaced by Foster, Deva, and Toya. But even with new alliances and a purpose, Thea feels the enormity of being one against millions. It’s then that Henry’s business card falls out of her pocket and lands at her feet. She takes it as a sign to go no further.
~ ~ ~
It’s a very dark 5AM when Thea arrives at the modest midrise in downtown Denver that houses KJRJ. Although she’s amped on donut-shop coffee and ninety minutes of sleep, she’s so nervous that she’s sure people can hear her teeth chattering. She’s been telling everyone who matters that KJRJ is going to be their station for their music, and by the way, she’s going to be a DJ, a point which she undersells, as she assumes she’s going to suck at it, that she’ll have her moment, then hand off the mic to someone more qualified. She spent the days leading up to her debut standing before the bathroom mirror practicing her radio voice. The more she tried to sound professional and cool, the more she came off sounding like her mother. In the end, and with Henry’s reassurance, she decides just to be herself.
When the moment arrives and Thea is ushered into the booth, she feels her pounding heart is about to crack her ribs. She stares at the mic. It’s like the first time she came face to face with a cock, intense longing paired with complete and total loss. Henry hands her the headphones.
“Just tell the people who you are and what you’re playing. Kathy will do the rest.”
“Okay,” she whispers.
“Except you’ll have to talk louder than that.”
“Got it.”
Henry steps out of the booth. Kathy, the demolition engineer from The Colorado School of Mines who resembles Lene Lovich, gives Thea a countdown with her black fingernails, then abruptly points. A red light comes on and Thea closes with the mic.
“Hi, I’m Thea. Uh, this is the new KJRJ.” She gazes across the room at stack after stack of old LPs, and her anxiety falls away. “Goodbye Dylan. Goodbye Stones. Goodbye Beatles. Goodbye Kenny Loggins. KJRJ now sounds like this:”
Kathy hits play. God Save the Queen launches out into Denver’s sleepy dawn skies like a long-foretold Soviet missile strike. After that comes Blitzkrieg Bop, With a Hip, Safe European Home, Tommy Gun, Hanging on The Telephone, Going Underground, and The Last’s cover of Be Bop a Lula.
Thea says what she’s played, then steps aside for the requisite prerecorded announcements and commercials that follow her playlist like elephant shit at the circus. It doesn’t take long for her to fall into a groove. Within half-an-hour, she feels like she’s been doing this her whole life. She doesn’t have any radio gimmicks. She’s just Thea. She’s most excited when she’s able to play actual Denver bands, who’d otherwise never stand a chance on a commercial station. Her four hour shift passes in a blur. She ends it with Siouxsie and The Banshees’ Overground. When she steps out of the booth, she’s got sweat stains under her arms and is filled with a breathless exhilaration that makes her want to have sex with everybody.
Henry’s been waiting in the hall like an expectant father. He gives her a congratulatory embrace. “You were great,” he says. “We got one-hundred-and-sixty-seven complaints.” When Thea frowns, Henry puts his hand on her shoulder. “That’s good. We expect a lot of turnover. By the end of the week, it’ll be the opposite.”
“Okay,” she says, too dazed to take it all in. She feels like she’s been hit with a bottle again, only in a good way. “I could actually feel thousands of people listening to me. Is it always going to feel like that?”
“Yup,” Henry says with a grin.
Thea practically floats down the hall, basking in the applause and adoration of the staffers. She leaves the station feeling five feet tall.
Never really a morning person, Thea is not used to being so fully alive at 10AM. She still has to drive back to campus for her survey course on human sexuality, but when she walks into the lecture hall, she’s too horny to focus on intercourse. She drifts over to the student union and approaches a guy she knows from Early European Renaissance Art and tells him her apartment is empty if he’d like to come back to her bedroom. With a shrug, he pushes aside his Denver omelet and follows her home.
~ ~ ~
The next day, Thea once again arrives at the station sleep-deprived and amped, but this time it’s not nerves but adrenalin. She practically sprints from the parking lot. She’d been up all night partying with a collection of bands who sought her out like she was selling tickets for the last spaceship off a dying world. At her 6AM start time, she’s in her chair, headphones on, having handed Kathy a shoebox of cassettes and a playlist of 140 songs.
During a commercial break at her show’s midpoint, Henry brings her a coffee. He jokes about what their sponsors must be thinking and makes an offhand remark about what’s going on in the park across the street.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. There’s a gathering for John.”
Thea’s heart jumps. “John Lydon?” She pictures a too-good-to-be true scenario of Denver’s new music fans coming out in force to celebrate the station’s conversion.
“John Lennon,” Henry says. “It’s the anniversary of his death. There’s a vigil or something in the park.”
“Oh. Right.”
“They’d been planning it for weeks. We were supposed to have a Beatles marathon, play some interviews. A Day of John, they called it. If you feel like saying something, you can.”
“Like what?”
“How much he meant to you growing up, that kind of thing.”
“Okay.” Thea wraps both hands around the KJRJ mug and lets her face bathe in the steam. Henry tells her to keep up the good work, then jokes about how corporate that sounds.
When the set ends, Thea leans toward the mic. “So, I know people are doing tributes to John Lennon today, and that’s great and all, but that’s not what we’re about. So, here’s The Buzzcocks.” And with that comes Orgasm Addict.
While the song plays, Thea slips down the hall to find a window overlooking the park. She expects to see a dozen people holding candles and someone with a boombox playing Yellow Submarine. But when she looks down to the street, she can’t help but gasp.
It’s just after 8 and there must be a thousand people outside with more coming every minute. They’re dressed for a gray, snowy day. They’re dressed to endure. There are dozens of homemade signs. There are giant blow-up photos of John and The Beatles. And yes, there are candles lit, hundreds of them. Even through the double-pane window, Thea can hear the crowd singing Instant Karma. Apparently, no one bothered to tell the assembled that the vigil had been canceled, and no one at the station bothered to consider that ignoring the gathering might lead to problems. Thea knows she’s too high up to be seen from the street, but she can’t help but feel that the singing from below is directed at her. When Thea takes her place before the mic, her eyes catch sight of the switchboard. Flashing lights pop like hundreds of tiny explosions without end.
By 10AM, the crowd that had come to celebrate John has morphed into a protest against the station. Taking a page from the Iranian student marches of 1979, the voices in the street begin chanting, Death to punk! and Bring back real rock!
A man who resembles a bureaucratic civil servant has taken up a bullhorn and addresses the crowd from a milkcrate. “Have you heard the crap they’re playing? It’s a travesty. John Lennon is dead, and they’re pissing on his grave.”
A chorus of boos rises from below.
“John is dead, and they’re playing a song called I’m So Bored with the USA. Can you believe that?”
The crowd launches into a jingoistic chant of “USA! USA! USA!”
“Are we gonna let them take away our rock? I don’t know about you,” shouts the man. “But if they don’t play Peaceful Easy Feeling, I’m gonna burn this station to the ground!”
Let’s Lynch the Landlord gleefully barrels out of the wall speakers that hang in every room of the station, but the crowd noise from outside bleeds into every note and lyric. While the voices from the street are not nearly loud enough to drown out the music, they succeed in blemishing Thea’s carefully orchestrated arrangements. Not even The Ramones can compete with the Bring Back Real Rock chant that penetrates the ancient bricks of the building.
The station’s parent company calls the owner. The owner calls the general manager, and the general manager calls Henry into his office. The event has made the local news, though in a questionable move of self-censorship, it’s not mentioned by the station’s own newscaster during the noon newsbreak. Sponsors become concerned. They thought they were buying time on a pop music station to reach their valued demographic, not funding anarchy. The crowd outside swells to five thousand, and the people in their righteous might fill the air with all the songs KJRJ refuses to play. No one sets the building ablaze, but the damage is done.
By the next day, the new music format is dead, replaced by something now called Classic Rock. The new morning DJ, who was the old morning DJ before he was unceremoniously supplanted by Thea, is triumphant. He doesn’t actually apologize for the last forty-eight hours, but he makes it clear that after a brief moment of delirium, KJRJ now has its head on straight. He opens his show with a marathon of Beatles songs followed by Stairway to Heaven, which serves as a conduit for mere mortals to send their love to John.
~ ~ ~
Henry and Thea decide to celebrate their termination with a night at Meat Locker. She picks up Henry outside his modest apartment, and they ride in near silence toward Capitol Hill.
“Congratulations,” Henry says. “You may have had the shortest DJ career in the history of showbiz.” He’s trying to make light of the whole thing, but he looks like someone on his way to prison.
“It’s gonna be okay,” she says, trying to convince herself as much as him. “They can slow us down, but they can’t stop us.”
Thea pulls over at the appropriate side street. She parks the LTD and steps onto the sidewalk to take off her clothes. When she’s down to just a T-shirt, pants, and boots, Henry removes his coat and puts it around her.
“Thanks,” she says. “It’s so hot in there I never bother wearing anything.”
They make their way along the icy sidewalk. Kidd recognizes Thea and waves them in, no charge. Thea thinks it’s a token of respect for her broadcast, but more likely it’s because her name amuses him to no end.
Inside, amid the sweltering heat and the tobacco stench, The Penetraitors churn out rapid-fire cords that has the crowd crashing about the room like passengers on a storm-tossed ocean liner. Thea returns Henry’s coat to him, but the former program director abruptly slams it to the floor and marches straight for the swirling melee in front of the stage.
Thea lunges after him, but Henry’s thrown himself into the thick of it. When the punks ram into him, he shoves right back. One scabby skinhead in a ripped T-shirt elbows Henry in the ribs while another slaps a palm into his head. Henry’s glasses fly off, then four or five of the crowd begin pounding on him, first with fists until he falls, then with boots once he’s on the ground. Thea screams before she even knows she’s doing it and torpedoes her way through all the bigger bodies to Henry’s side. Ronnie waves the band to stop playing. This brings the room to a standstill. Thea’s able to pull Henry from the pit just as Kidd hurls past her and flattens two of the clubgoers at once.
Thea has her arms wrapped around Henry’s arm and tows him through the club, not stopping until they’re outside. Blood runs from Henry’s nose. There’s a cut on his forehead. He groans and staggers like someone just pulled from wreckage. Thea has him sit on the curb and gathers a handful of ice from the sidewalk and places it in his hand. Kidd brings a roll of paper towels, and Thea uses it to create an icepack, which she gently presses to Henry’s wounds.
“They called me names,” Henry moans. “They thought I didn’t belong.”
“I’m sorry, fucking shits.” She asks him how he is and he makes a joke of it.
“Part of the job,” he says.
They’re both quiet as clubgoers loiter and stare, and the house manager, a person neither of them knew existed until this moment, comes to check on Henry. They determine nothing’s broken as Kidd escorts the guys from inside down the sidewalk. Then the music starts back up again, and it’s like it never happened.
Kidd brings Henry a bottle of water and his parka and glasses. Henry bundles the coat into his lap and puts his glasses in his breast pocket. He drinks with one hand and adjusts the icepack with the other.
“I finally found something,” Henry mutters. “Spent half my life looking for something to believe in. This music saved me.”
“Me too,” Thea says softly.
“Now look. Just a different bunch of dicks in different clothes.” Henry considers the bloody paper towel and taps the wounds with his fingers. “‘Be secret and exult, Because of all things known that is most difficult.’ It’s from a poem by Yeats. To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.”
The Penetraitors have finished their set. The club’s house music snakes out the open door and into the night. It’s normally something Thea would tune out, but this time’s different. It’s not Pink Floyd. It’s Joy Division’s Digital.
Thea taps Henry’s arm with her elbow. “Hear that?” she asks with a dopey grin. “Progress.”
For Ronnie Cramer
Jonathan Berzer
It’s near midnight when Thea parks her lumbering 1977 LTD in the slush of a quiet Capitol Hill side street. She clamps on the steering wheel lock. She bolts the accelerator lock. She stashes her cassette player in the glovebox. Then she steps out into the frigid Denver night to get undressed. By the light of a streetlamp, she pulls off her outerwear: her parka, her sweater, her thermal top, her gloves and scarf. She doesn’t stop until she’s left in only a Joy Division T-shirt, pants, and boots. The winter gear gets buried under the seat beneath a pile of newspapers. She never brings a purse, only cash, her ID, and cotton for her ears. Cursing and shivering, she locks the car and sets off for the club, running in the street to keep from slipping on the ice.
Outside Meat Locker, a squad of skinheads loiter and slurp from bagged cans of beer. Their boots and army surplus are supposed to make them look like soldiers, but their faces are soft and babyish. With their sheared heads, they look like newborns.
Kidd the bouncer, a University of Colorado offensive tackle, literally blocks the door. Thea pays her ten bucks and holds up her ID. Kidd scans the card with a flashlight.
“Thea Thud? That’s your name?” he asks with wry amusement.
“Uh huh,” Thea answers briskly. She’s a good sixteen inches below Kidd’s eye level and has to crane her neck to look up at him.
“Is that your real name or did you make it up?”
“That’s my real name,” she says with the defiance that comes from having had this conversation about a million times, and at four-foot-eleven, having spent half her life looking up to people she considers inferior. “I was born for punk,” she adds with a snarl.
Kidd nods with a laugh. “In you go. Watch your step. Don’t go thud.”
Thea rolls her eyes and squeezes past him.
To step into Meat Locker is to experience a carnival of sensory extremes. The temperature is somewhere in the 90s, which instantly cures Thea of her hypothermia, but that’s the club’s only aesthetic benefit. Otherwise, it’s a shithole. It’s a filth-lined cesspool that would have to be power-washed for a year just to be the Augean stables before Hercules ran a river through it. It’s a former dry cleaners with no windows, crappy lights, and a stage. There’s nowhere to sit, barely room to stand, and stale air that’s comprised of secondhand smoke and sweat. The word EXIT might as well be replaced with the word BURN. There’s a guy in the corner selling Coors from a keg. There’s one toilet, though Thea’s never dared venture near it and wouldn’t unless she were looking for a place to die.
Having been grabbed and groped too many times, Thea steers clear of the mosh pit and the melee of idiots who’ve come to Meat Locker just to fight and spit. She finds what would be a quiet corner if this were a teahouse and settles in for the long wait that is the price of clubgoing.
The mixing board operator puts on the house music while the stage is cleared by roadies. Thea feels the bile rise in her throat. She makes her way over to the man’s riser against the back wall.
“Hey,” she says.
The man, a long-hair in a Zeppelin T-shirt, looks around as if he’s received a call from God.
“Can you not play Pink Floyd?”
The guy looks at her through vague, bloodshot eyes.
“Can you play something good?”
“This is good,” he answers.
“It’s 1981, can’t you play something new? We’re trying to do something. We’re tearing down the wall.”
“This is The Wall,” says the engineer, clearly thinking Thea has come to make a request.
She’s almost tempted to run back to her car and get one of her mix tapes. “Can’t you play anything new?”
The man holds out a box of cassettes with nothing but AOR.
“Billy Joel? Yeah, play that,” she says with a grin.
The man lowers his voice. “Are you kidding? These guys would set the place on fire.”
“Maybe they should.” She turns on her heels and returns to her spot.
At 1AM, the band she’s come to see takes the stage. The Bunnydrums play in near darkness. The music is darker than the room, hypnotic and grim, what would emerge if a jack hammer had pangs of loneliness. Thea finds a place on the side where she’s not hemmed in by all the taller, smellier bodies.
The band is halfway through their set when something smacks into Thea’s head and breaks at her feet. She falls to her knees as a fist of pain radiates from her occipital bone. All around her is broken glass that resembles a beer bottle. Nobody helps her up. Nobody seems to notice she’s on the floor. Everybody in places like this has seen just about everything.
She stands and kicks the glass away. She’s more angry than injured. Now there’s a throbbing bruise on her head competing with the music. She’s not going to let some asshole ruin her night, but after ten minutes, the rising headache has soured her on the whole experience. She shoves her way to the exit, treating each person in her path like the one who was responsible.
The night air proves to be a balm to her spirit and her head, while the heat emanating off her bare arms forms a barrier against the chill. She sits on the curb and takes up a handful of ice from the sidewalk and holds it to her scalp.
A guy who’s dressed like the enemy comes up to her. “Are you okay?” he asks. He looks at her through punch-me-in-the-face wire-rimmed glasses. His parka is a bit too new. His buttoned-down shirt is standard officewear. His shoes are the soft suede of a church-going dad. His hair is floppy and formless. He looks around forty.
“Yeah.” Thea answers, taking turns with each hand to hold the ice. “Happens all the time,” she tries to say with nonchalance. “Are you the owner or something?”
“No. I’m here for the bands. I’m Henry from KJRJ.”
She gives his attire a critical appraisal. “Maybe the bottle was meant for you.”
“I heard what you said to Mr. Pink Floyd. You should come by the station.”
She frowns.
“I’m the program director.”
“What’re you doing here?”
“Well, why wouldn’t I be here. It’s my job.”
“KJRJ. Music for the Elderly,” she says in a radio announcer’s silky dulcet tone.
“I know, I know. I’m trying to introduce new music. Trying.” He looks around with a resigned sigh.
“Really? You guys? You might want to think about what you wear next time.”
Henry shakes his head. “It’s not about clothes or hair. It’s about the music. That’s why I’m here. U2 is coming to Denver. There’s no reason why a commercial station can’t lead the charge. Rock and roll used to be about innovation, about the cutting edge. Now record companies and big radio don’t give a shit. They’ve decided what’s rock and roll, and it stopped dead in 1976.”
Thea pats her head for blood. “You know, they don’t sell beer in bottles inside. Somebody snuck one in and launched it. No wonder nobody takes us seriously.”
Henry offers to take a look at her scalp and says he sees nothing serious between the spikes of hair. “Come by the station.”
“Why?”
“I want to put you on the air.”
Thea isn’t sure whether he’s trying to sleep with her, is putting her on, or is simply deranged. “What?” is all she can reply.
“I want you to have your own show.”
“I don’t know anything about radio.”
“That’s why I want you on the air.”
When she frowns at him, he frowns back.
“I’m serious,” he says. “Deadly serious. Like a bottle to the head.”
~ ~ ~
Growing up in Denver, Thea, despite having the surname of something dull and lifeless, was anything but. She not only fit in, she was the poster child for fitting in. She wore Ralph Lauren and got her hair cut in a style that could be considered East Coast Colorado outdoorsy. She skied, kayaked, played field hockey. She spent Christmases sitting by a fireplace in a cabin that looked like a gingerbread house, singing along to holiday standards.
Thea didn’t understand people who fought with their parents. She loved her parents. Her dad the classical guitarist, her mom the optometrist were the epitome of square, and why not. That’s what parents were supposed to be. They were early to bed, early to rise, thrifty and sensible. Theodore Thud’s great act of rebellion was becoming an expert skier, gracefully carving up black diamond runs all over the world, never once going thud. Dr. Janice Shipley—who did not take her husband’s name for professional reasons—birthed three boys before Thea came along and was so relieved to have a daughter that she practically smothered her in pink and velvet. Thea’s brothers were typical pot-smoking jocks with ‘70s hair and a disdain for anything formal, especially their father’s music. Growing up surrounded by giant trees, mountain peaks, and a soundtrack provided by her father’s nimbly-strumming fingers, Thea developed a very economical sense of self. The key to happiness was to avoid things that made one unhappy. She liked music that had an easy beat and could be danced to and aspired to be Olivia Newton John or a neurologist.
Then in the summer of her freshman year, she jetted off to London to continue her studies in art history, tour Parliament, The National Gallery, The Tate, and take side trips to Paris and Florence, where The Louvre, The Pompidou, and David waited. One afternoon while sipping tea outside the Gloucester Arms, she was thumbing through a stray copy of The Face and happened upon an interview with Siouxsie Sioux, where the queen of goth dismissed Bruce Springsteen’s music as hideous. Thea gasped. Anyone with Siouxsie’s racoon eye makeup should be careful about who she calls hideous. This was heresy. No one back home would ever dare trash The Boss. She pushed the magazine aside, finished her tea and walked the few short blocks to Proms at Royal Albert Hall.
Her conversion didn’t happen overnight. It began with The Police, Graham Parker, and Elvis Costello. She thought The Pistols were gross, but their sound was so infectious that she’d start pogoing in the pub until people told her to stop. Then came Digital. She fell in love with Ian Curtis, then Ian McCulloch. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw a middle-school class treasurer. Her hair expressed nothing about her except that she was a nobody, so she chopped it short and dyed it blue black.
When she got back to Denver, she marched into her apartment, yanked Neil Young off the turntable and put on Gang of Four. Her roommates withdrew as if some feral dog had broken into their home. They looked at her spiked hair and combat boots and suggested she attend a Bible study. A week later, Thea would find a new place to live.
She was the first punk in the history of the University of Denver. She reveled in the stares of the Republican preppies who dominated the campus. Ironically, instead of becoming an outcast, her transformation made her a draw. She was approached by those who wanted to know why she’d painted NO FUTURE with Liquid Paper on the back of her beat-to-hell leather jacket. It also made her irresistible to guys, who, not knowing their asses from a hole in the ground, assumed that because she dressed like a punk, it meant she was not beholden to the conventions of dating and courtship, and thus was an easy lay. As a result, she’d devised many new and creative ways of saying, Fuck off.
The music changed her, and it was through the music that she was able to see past the veneer, that everybody was troubled in one way or another, that her father hid behind his guitar to avoid uncomfortable silence or uncomfortable discussions with her mother, that her brothers were terrified of navigating a world that was not as orderly and unambiguous as a hockey rink or a slalom course. This new music wasn’t about partying and feeling good but about feeling the pain that everybody seeks to bury and letting it out with a ferocious, Hey Ho Let’s Go! Thea had found the truth and there was no going back.
~ ~ ~
The next night, Thea’s at DU’s one and only pub, waiting for The Penetraitors to take the stage. She greets Ronnie, the band’s guitarist and songwriter, and takes a table near the front. The pub is small, the stage sliced out of one corner. The bar serves a light beer that’s suitable for those too young to drink. The other students, who huddle around pitchers with their backs to the stage, look like Thea before she went to London. They’re clearly not here for the band.
While the band sets up, Thea is drawn into a quarrel with her archeology professor, a bearded ponytail from the ‘60s, who proclaims that the music of her generation is crap.
Eyes narrowing, Thea pounces. “Your generation created the shit we’re in,” she says as they face off, each gripping a pint of lager. “Our music gets people on their feet, speaks to them about their lives. Our music is a wake-up call.”
The archaeologist’s haughty laugh drips with condescension. “Our music is timeless. Nobody’s going to be listening to punk rock new wave whatever in twenty years. Our music is the greatest music that ever was. It helped end a war and spoke to civil rights. You can’t deny our history.”
Thea huffs and shakes her head. “You rebelled against the establishment. Now we’re rebelling against you, and you can’t stand it. You’re the establishment now, and it’s driving you crazy.”
“Yeah? What about Devo?” the man says, as if laying down four aces.
“Hey, I’ll take Mongoloid over Eric Clapton any day.”
“Clapton is God,” the professor declares with evangelical conviction. After a sip of beer, he puts his glass aside. “So, you wanna go back to my place and fool around?”
Thea scowls. “It’s bad enough that you’re a teacher and I’m a student, but the fact that you like Clapton makes me wanna puke.”
And so ends their debate. This isn’t quite a bottle to the head, but the man’s self-righteous posturing has burrowed into her brain, and even though The Penetraitors open with one of her favorites, the music is once again tainted.
When the pub closes, Thea commits to a long walk on a path of snow. She heads off in no particular direction, hands jammed in the pockets of her parka. She’s been taking a lot of these walks lately, stomping through snow, going nowhere, grumbling under her breath about the state of the world, or her life and the people in it. Her parents are convinced that London ruined their daughter. Her mother’s only response to Thea’s artful explanation of the new music revolution was, What have you done to your hair? When her brothers gang up on her in defense of Foreigner and Bad Company, she retaliates by throwing their Penthouse magazines into the fireplace. Her childhood friends Lisa, Laura, and Leslie are replaced by Foster, Deva, and Toya. But even with new alliances and a purpose, Thea feels the enormity of being one against millions. It’s then that Henry’s business card falls out of her pocket and lands at her feet. She takes it as a sign to go no further.
~ ~ ~
It’s a very dark 5AM when Thea arrives at the modest midrise in downtown Denver that houses KJRJ. Although she’s amped on donut-shop coffee and ninety minutes of sleep, she’s so nervous that she’s sure people can hear her teeth chattering. She’s been telling everyone who matters that KJRJ is going to be their station for their music, and by the way, she’s going to be a DJ, a point which she undersells, as she assumes she’s going to suck at it, that she’ll have her moment, then hand off the mic to someone more qualified. She spent the days leading up to her debut standing before the bathroom mirror practicing her radio voice. The more she tried to sound professional and cool, the more she came off sounding like her mother. In the end, and with Henry’s reassurance, she decides just to be herself.
When the moment arrives and Thea is ushered into the booth, she feels her pounding heart is about to crack her ribs. She stares at the mic. It’s like the first time she came face to face with a cock, intense longing paired with complete and total loss. Henry hands her the headphones.
“Just tell the people who you are and what you’re playing. Kathy will do the rest.”
“Okay,” she whispers.
“Except you’ll have to talk louder than that.”
“Got it.”
Henry steps out of the booth. Kathy, the demolition engineer from The Colorado School of Mines who resembles Lene Lovich, gives Thea a countdown with her black fingernails, then abruptly points. A red light comes on and Thea closes with the mic.
“Hi, I’m Thea. Uh, this is the new KJRJ.” She gazes across the room at stack after stack of old LPs, and her anxiety falls away. “Goodbye Dylan. Goodbye Stones. Goodbye Beatles. Goodbye Kenny Loggins. KJRJ now sounds like this:”
Kathy hits play. God Save the Queen launches out into Denver’s sleepy dawn skies like a long-foretold Soviet missile strike. After that comes Blitzkrieg Bop, With a Hip, Safe European Home, Tommy Gun, Hanging on The Telephone, Going Underground, and The Last’s cover of Be Bop a Lula.
Thea says what she’s played, then steps aside for the requisite prerecorded announcements and commercials that follow her playlist like elephant shit at the circus. It doesn’t take long for her to fall into a groove. Within half-an-hour, she feels like she’s been doing this her whole life. She doesn’t have any radio gimmicks. She’s just Thea. She’s most excited when she’s able to play actual Denver bands, who’d otherwise never stand a chance on a commercial station. Her four hour shift passes in a blur. She ends it with Siouxsie and The Banshees’ Overground. When she steps out of the booth, she’s got sweat stains under her arms and is filled with a breathless exhilaration that makes her want to have sex with everybody.
Henry’s been waiting in the hall like an expectant father. He gives her a congratulatory embrace. “You were great,” he says. “We got one-hundred-and-sixty-seven complaints.” When Thea frowns, Henry puts his hand on her shoulder. “That’s good. We expect a lot of turnover. By the end of the week, it’ll be the opposite.”
“Okay,” she says, too dazed to take it all in. She feels like she’s been hit with a bottle again, only in a good way. “I could actually feel thousands of people listening to me. Is it always going to feel like that?”
“Yup,” Henry says with a grin.
Thea practically floats down the hall, basking in the applause and adoration of the staffers. She leaves the station feeling five feet tall.
Never really a morning person, Thea is not used to being so fully alive at 10AM. She still has to drive back to campus for her survey course on human sexuality, but when she walks into the lecture hall, she’s too horny to focus on intercourse. She drifts over to the student union and approaches a guy she knows from Early European Renaissance Art and tells him her apartment is empty if he’d like to come back to her bedroom. With a shrug, he pushes aside his Denver omelet and follows her home.
~ ~ ~
The next day, Thea once again arrives at the station sleep-deprived and amped, but this time it’s not nerves but adrenalin. She practically sprints from the parking lot. She’d been up all night partying with a collection of bands who sought her out like she was selling tickets for the last spaceship off a dying world. At her 6AM start time, she’s in her chair, headphones on, having handed Kathy a shoebox of cassettes and a playlist of 140 songs.
During a commercial break at her show’s midpoint, Henry brings her a coffee. He jokes about what their sponsors must be thinking and makes an offhand remark about what’s going on in the park across the street.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. There’s a gathering for John.”
Thea’s heart jumps. “John Lydon?” She pictures a too-good-to-be true scenario of Denver’s new music fans coming out in force to celebrate the station’s conversion.
“John Lennon,” Henry says. “It’s the anniversary of his death. There’s a vigil or something in the park.”
“Oh. Right.”
“They’d been planning it for weeks. We were supposed to have a Beatles marathon, play some interviews. A Day of John, they called it. If you feel like saying something, you can.”
“Like what?”
“How much he meant to you growing up, that kind of thing.”
“Okay.” Thea wraps both hands around the KJRJ mug and lets her face bathe in the steam. Henry tells her to keep up the good work, then jokes about how corporate that sounds.
When the set ends, Thea leans toward the mic. “So, I know people are doing tributes to John Lennon today, and that’s great and all, but that’s not what we’re about. So, here’s The Buzzcocks.” And with that comes Orgasm Addict.
While the song plays, Thea slips down the hall to find a window overlooking the park. She expects to see a dozen people holding candles and someone with a boombox playing Yellow Submarine. But when she looks down to the street, she can’t help but gasp.
It’s just after 8 and there must be a thousand people outside with more coming every minute. They’re dressed for a gray, snowy day. They’re dressed to endure. There are dozens of homemade signs. There are giant blow-up photos of John and The Beatles. And yes, there are candles lit, hundreds of them. Even through the double-pane window, Thea can hear the crowd singing Instant Karma. Apparently, no one bothered to tell the assembled that the vigil had been canceled, and no one at the station bothered to consider that ignoring the gathering might lead to problems. Thea knows she’s too high up to be seen from the street, but she can’t help but feel that the singing from below is directed at her. When Thea takes her place before the mic, her eyes catch sight of the switchboard. Flashing lights pop like hundreds of tiny explosions without end.
By 10AM, the crowd that had come to celebrate John has morphed into a protest against the station. Taking a page from the Iranian student marches of 1979, the voices in the street begin chanting, Death to punk! and Bring back real rock!
A man who resembles a bureaucratic civil servant has taken up a bullhorn and addresses the crowd from a milkcrate. “Have you heard the crap they’re playing? It’s a travesty. John Lennon is dead, and they’re pissing on his grave.”
A chorus of boos rises from below.
“John is dead, and they’re playing a song called I’m So Bored with the USA. Can you believe that?”
The crowd launches into a jingoistic chant of “USA! USA! USA!”
“Are we gonna let them take away our rock? I don’t know about you,” shouts the man. “But if they don’t play Peaceful Easy Feeling, I’m gonna burn this station to the ground!”
Let’s Lynch the Landlord gleefully barrels out of the wall speakers that hang in every room of the station, but the crowd noise from outside bleeds into every note and lyric. While the voices from the street are not nearly loud enough to drown out the music, they succeed in blemishing Thea’s carefully orchestrated arrangements. Not even The Ramones can compete with the Bring Back Real Rock chant that penetrates the ancient bricks of the building.
The station’s parent company calls the owner. The owner calls the general manager, and the general manager calls Henry into his office. The event has made the local news, though in a questionable move of self-censorship, it’s not mentioned by the station’s own newscaster during the noon newsbreak. Sponsors become concerned. They thought they were buying time on a pop music station to reach their valued demographic, not funding anarchy. The crowd outside swells to five thousand, and the people in their righteous might fill the air with all the songs KJRJ refuses to play. No one sets the building ablaze, but the damage is done.
By the next day, the new music format is dead, replaced by something now called Classic Rock. The new morning DJ, who was the old morning DJ before he was unceremoniously supplanted by Thea, is triumphant. He doesn’t actually apologize for the last forty-eight hours, but he makes it clear that after a brief moment of delirium, KJRJ now has its head on straight. He opens his show with a marathon of Beatles songs followed by Stairway to Heaven, which serves as a conduit for mere mortals to send their love to John.
~ ~ ~
Henry and Thea decide to celebrate their termination with a night at Meat Locker. She picks up Henry outside his modest apartment, and they ride in near silence toward Capitol Hill.
“Congratulations,” Henry says. “You may have had the shortest DJ career in the history of showbiz.” He’s trying to make light of the whole thing, but he looks like someone on his way to prison.
“It’s gonna be okay,” she says, trying to convince herself as much as him. “They can slow us down, but they can’t stop us.”
Thea pulls over at the appropriate side street. She parks the LTD and steps onto the sidewalk to take off her clothes. When she’s down to just a T-shirt, pants, and boots, Henry removes his coat and puts it around her.
“Thanks,” she says. “It’s so hot in there I never bother wearing anything.”
They make their way along the icy sidewalk. Kidd recognizes Thea and waves them in, no charge. Thea thinks it’s a token of respect for her broadcast, but more likely it’s because her name amuses him to no end.
Inside, amid the sweltering heat and the tobacco stench, The Penetraitors churn out rapid-fire cords that has the crowd crashing about the room like passengers on a storm-tossed ocean liner. Thea returns Henry’s coat to him, but the former program director abruptly slams it to the floor and marches straight for the swirling melee in front of the stage.
Thea lunges after him, but Henry’s thrown himself into the thick of it. When the punks ram into him, he shoves right back. One scabby skinhead in a ripped T-shirt elbows Henry in the ribs while another slaps a palm into his head. Henry’s glasses fly off, then four or five of the crowd begin pounding on him, first with fists until he falls, then with boots once he’s on the ground. Thea screams before she even knows she’s doing it and torpedoes her way through all the bigger bodies to Henry’s side. Ronnie waves the band to stop playing. This brings the room to a standstill. Thea’s able to pull Henry from the pit just as Kidd hurls past her and flattens two of the clubgoers at once.
Thea has her arms wrapped around Henry’s arm and tows him through the club, not stopping until they’re outside. Blood runs from Henry’s nose. There’s a cut on his forehead. He groans and staggers like someone just pulled from wreckage. Thea has him sit on the curb and gathers a handful of ice from the sidewalk and places it in his hand. Kidd brings a roll of paper towels, and Thea uses it to create an icepack, which she gently presses to Henry’s wounds.
“They called me names,” Henry moans. “They thought I didn’t belong.”
“I’m sorry, fucking shits.” She asks him how he is and he makes a joke of it.
“Part of the job,” he says.
They’re both quiet as clubgoers loiter and stare, and the house manager, a person neither of them knew existed until this moment, comes to check on Henry. They determine nothing’s broken as Kidd escorts the guys from inside down the sidewalk. Then the music starts back up again, and it’s like it never happened.
Kidd brings Henry a bottle of water and his parka and glasses. Henry bundles the coat into his lap and puts his glasses in his breast pocket. He drinks with one hand and adjusts the icepack with the other.
“I finally found something,” Henry mutters. “Spent half my life looking for something to believe in. This music saved me.”
“Me too,” Thea says softly.
“Now look. Just a different bunch of dicks in different clothes.” Henry considers the bloody paper towel and taps the wounds with his fingers. “‘Be secret and exult, Because of all things known that is most difficult.’ It’s from a poem by Yeats. To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.”
The Penetraitors have finished their set. The club’s house music snakes out the open door and into the night. It’s normally something Thea would tune out, but this time’s different. It’s not Pink Floyd. It’s Joy Division’s Digital.
Thea taps Henry’s arm with her elbow. “Hear that?” she asks with a dopey grin. “Progress.”
